Ethics in the Information Age Discussion Project on Copyright
Discuss and try to agree on answers to the following questions:
Note: The ‘why?’ is as important as the ‘what?’.
Some things to consider:
Does the work that they do to produce their works give them a moral right to control what is done with that work? Does it give them a moral right to profit from that work? Is there any reason to treat these moral rights as temporary? Should the fact that much of this creative work is done as “work for hire,” where the employer ends up owning the rights and not the actual creator, change our assessment at all? What about the fact that copyrights persist long after the death of the creator of the work? (Does my right to profit from my intellectual/artistic labor, if I have one, include a right to pass on that ability to my heirs?) How should we deal with Stallman’s observation that the Copyright Clause of the US Constitution seems to say that the purpose of copyright laws is to benefit the public and not to protect the natural rights of creators?